Small black anchor tattoo on the nape of a neck, shown in two photographs with dark hair falling around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small anchor tattoo on the nape of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black anchor is tattooed centrally on the back of a neck, with its shank, stock and flukes drawn in clean outline. The top photograph is a close view and the lower one is taken from further away, showing a cream strap over the shoulder. The ink is solid black on warm skin, and the composition is centred on the tattoo.

Fine line Neck Anchor Nautical Neck

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of August the apples in Hallow Orchard hung so low that the pickers had to stoop beneath them, and Maud Pennick, who kept the ladders, said the trees were hunting for water. The stream had dwindled to a thread. Nobody had seen a barge on the Wend since the spring floods took the lock gate, so when a stranger came up the lane one evening with a sea chest on a handcart, people left their suppers to look.

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He was a ferryman from the coast who had lost his boat and his road both. He asked for work and was given the windfalls to gather, which he did slowly, and he never once looked up at the hill where the old quay stones lay under the grass. Maud noticed that. She noticed too that he carried a coil of rope everywhere, and that each night he tied one knot in it beside the gate.

On the last evening of the month he came to her with the rope cut short and a small iron anchor in his palm, rust-brown and no longer than a finger. "My father's," he said. "He told me a thing that holds in a storm will hold in still water too, if you bury it deep enough." They dug under the old pear tree where the roots ran down toward the dry bed of the Wend. The ground was hard. By lamplight they set the anchor in the clay and packed it firm, and nothing more was said.

Next morning the stream came back, not in a flood but as a steady brown tongue, as if it had only been waiting for something to stop it sliding past. The ferryman was gone with his handcart. Maud still tells it plainly: the orchard holds on, and if you ask at the gate, so will the water.